2017 Archives

Blog Archives for December 2015

Many years ago we got rid of our home phone service. We both had cell phones, nobody knew the number, we never used it; it was just a waste of $30+ every month. Once Claire arrived I knew at some point we'd need to get some kind of phone service in the house, at least for emergencies.

What I ended up doing was getting VOIP service over our broadband. I have an account with voip.ms and registered a DID number in my area code with them. Since you can pick your own number, you can pick one that either means something to you or is just easy to remember. I got a killer number with a bunch of repeating digits, very easy to remember. Then I just had to buy an analog phone adapter to bridge my analog phone with the VOIP provider.

Costs:

Analog adapter: $30 one time

voip.ms service: $0.009/minute

voip.ms number: $0.85/month

Once you own the ATA the cost for the service is basically nothing. Sure it depends on your internet, but ours is pretty stable. I don't use this phone often, but when I do it's never not worked. Rachelle actually called me this morning using this phone and it worked great. It sounded like any other phone from my end.

I've been using IPv6 at work for a few years now. Fibertech gave us a /48 with our service and it's worked perfectly since it was setup. I had to do quite a lot of setup on my switches/routers to get it working, but once that was done I haven't had to touch it since. Currently only servers have IPv6 addresses. I'm currently thinking about letting workstations use it, once I overcome a few implementation hurdles.

For a while I've been wondering if I can get IPv6 connectivity at home, but knowing Time Warner Cable I wasn't holding my breath. Regardless of whether TWC supported it, I knew the router I was using didn't support IPv6. It was an old Linksys WRT54GL flashed with DD-WRT. I've been using it for years and it's been great. After a bunch of research I found that a different variation of DD-WRT did support IPv6. So I flashed my router with that firmware and could see the options for IPv6, but they didn't work. A ton of wasted time later, I decided to retire this router.

I got a $19 TP-Link WR841N on Amazon because it was cheap as hell and supports 300Mbps 802.11n wireless. Sadly, it didn't support IPv6 out of the box or with an upgraded official firmware. The only version of DD-WRT that would actually boot on this router also didn't support it. But I found out that OpenWRT does! So I downloaded the latest version of OpenWRT for my router, flash it and rebooted. To my amazement, the router not only picked up a /128 IPv6 address on the WAN port but it picked up a separate /64 subnet and started handing them out to all my LAN clients that supported it!

So far this has been pretty painless. I'm happy this only cost me $19 and that upgraded my hardware to support 5x faster wireless speeds too.